Catspell

by Colleen Shannon

  October 2015

  Published by:

  The Fugl Group

  Pflugerville, TX 78660

  Notice: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as ‘unsold and destroyed’ to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this ‘stripped book.’

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Copyright 2006 by Colleen M. Fuglaar

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  ISBN 9780996941617

  Visit us on the web at colleenshannonauthor.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Arielle,” purred the rasping, sensual voice. “Come to me…”

  Like one possessed, Arielle Blaylock tossed and turned in her massive four poster bed carved with lion’s feet. In Arielle’s vision, she wasn’t trapped; she was fleet footed, her twisted leg strong and nimble. She had perfect night vision, the stygian darkness like day to her luminous gaze. Here, perhaps brambles slithered after her, snakelike, to trap her, but nothing frightened her. She was invincible…

  …and truly happy only in this strange netherworld, caught between two mystical beings, both ever out of reach. Both tempted her to a strength of limb and will beyond her in the real world people always told her to face. Why should she? She detested cold reality as much as she despised her weak earthly form.

  Only in dreams could she be free.

  Only in dreams, could she find him, the one the gods decreed would be her consort. But which of them was destined to be her lover? The one of the night? Or the one of the light?

  There, at the end of a tunnel, bathed in a luminescent glow, she saw the one of brightness. He was always turned away, his broad back naked, his loins covered in an Egyptian style sarong. He wore a headdress carved like a flowing lion’s mane, his burnished skin almost the same muted glow of the mask, as if inside and outside he were richly endowed with the royal metal of the Egyptian pharaohs and the warrior gods they worshiped.

  “Look at me,” she pleaded in her vision. “Let me see your face.”

  As he began to turn, she sensed the power in him, yet the gentleness, too. She reached out her arms, longing for that first glimpse of his face, but now the light was so bright she couldn’t distinguish his features against the glare. She felt his utter stillness, however, and his repressed wild need. As if it were not her he distrusted, but himself. Arielle ran faster to bridge the gap, but now her feet seemed to move in molasses, stuck in place.

  Why could she never reach him? Or distinguish his face?

  Standing over the bed, watching Arielle’s bad leg moving as easily as the good one, were two people. The man had a bearing that came naturally only to the titled and the wealthy, yet he wore every father’s grimace of despair for his only child. He tried to soothe Arielle’s brow with a damp cloth, encouraging her to return to him with a hummed lullaby, as if hoping some atavistic part of her tormented mind would follow the childhood beacon back to him.

  Instead, she tore the cloth away, arms outstretched, but not to either her father Rupert Blaylock, the Earl of Darby, or the woman he’d brought to cure her. Arielle’s deep blue eyes were open now, yet glowing amber in the half light, unseeing and unaware of anything but her inner journey.

  Beside the earl stood world famous investigator of psychic phenomena, Shelly Holmes, detective nonpareil. In contrast to the earl’s overwrought emotional state, she displayed only dispassionate appraisal. She made no conclusions, and formed no judgment, moral or otherwise.

  Shelly Holmes merely observed, seeing things other people missed.

  Her keen gray eyes moved from the girl, to the windows barred from the outside, and covered with wooden panels nailed in place on the inside. Even the gas fireplace had been blocked with a giant metal screen it would take Atlas himself to move. This luxurious room was more secure than any of the fortress keeps Shelly had seen, but by all accounts the precautions were futile. Even as she watched, tiny scratch marks began to appear on Arielle’s shapely arms one by one, as if drawn by a talon both playful and cruel.

  A talon of neither form nor substance yet it left a very tangible mark.

  Could it be the same talon that had slashed throats and ripped open the chests of three women in various parts of London? The motive, so far, was mysterious even to Scotland Yard’s renowned detectives. There seemed to be no link whatever between the victims: a baker’s daughter, a countess, and a preacher’s wife.

  And now a frail, virginal girl bore the same marks, though this assault seemed to be just beginning.

  The earl grasped his daughter’s shoulders, shaking her slightly in an effort to bring her back to him, but he withdrew his hands with a gasp of horror. Deeper scratches had appeared under his hands while he held her, dotted now with spots of blood.

  He stared at his own reddened palms and then whirled on Shelly. “What sorcery is this? Do something, woman! I’m paying you a fortune to bring her whole back to me.”

  Shelly gave him a cool glance. “I’d remind you, my dear sir, that I agreed to review your case. I have not yet agreed to the stipend.”

  She looked back at the girl, knowing, despite her leveler, that she’d already decided to take the case. Arielle’s strange behavior was the most persuasive evidence Shelly had ever beheld of astral projection, the ancient art of wizards and gods that allowed their spirit to travel where it willed even while their body remained imprisoned. A skill Merlin himself was rumored to excel at, though by all recounts, its origin began long before Merlin--on the desert plains of ancient Egypt.

  Even as Shelly watched more scratches appear on Arielle’s delicate shoulder, she felt a twinge of envy amid her concern. She had supernatural powers aplenty of her own but astral projection…what a skill to have. Even if it manifested itself as a curse. Shelly knew something of the blessings curses could sometimes offer, and she suspected, even without yet exchanging a word with Arielle, that the girl’s experience was similar.

  Despite her wounds, Arielle seemed more enraptured than tortured.

  Shelly tested Arielle’s temperature with the back of her hand. She’d expected the skin to be burning hot. Instead, Arielle was cool, as if the torment that marked her body and wracked her mind did not overstress her fragile constitution. It almost seemed as though this horrific seizure that suspended her spirit between real and twilight worlds were somehow normal.

  As if it were her destiny and her birth right.

  Balderdash, Shelly groused to herself.

  Shelly had never believed in the concept of destiny, for if one were merely a puppet on a string dancing at the behest of some larger force, then the mores guiding Shelly�
�s life were pointless. From the time she reached her precocious teens, Shelly had learned that only betterment of self accomplished the laudable goal of betterment of society. These worthy ends were attained not by the maudlin sentimentality of do-gooders, or even by the guilt of the repentant. No, the unerring pursuit of truth, and justice, and the fair society they promised could be accomplished only by that great leveling power that bridged the gap between kings and peasants: logic. Its application had shaped not only Shelly Holmes, but those she touched and saved by her use of it.

  Never, so it seemed, had she needed that impartiality more than now. She, too, was moved by the increasing mutilation she seemed powerless to stop. Seizing for inspiration, Shelly looked around. There must be something in the surroundings that fed the girl’s ailment.

  One thing was immediately apparent: Arielle seemed obsessed with cats.

  Figurines of every type of feline imaginable lined the shelves on the wall. A cat drawing done by a juvenile hand was framed and displayed opposite the bed. And even the pillow on the plush Turkish divan next to the fireplace was the needlepoint of a lioness with her head trustingly resting on the neck of an enormous male lion with a flowing black mane. The bed also bore a family crest in the headboard: a lioness rampant, a dove perched on her outstretched claw.

  “The crest…is that your own?” Shelly queried of the earl.

  “What? Oh, the bed. No, it’s one her mother’s grandfather had made up. It’s not in the Domesday book, I can tell you that. Miss Holmes…”

  When the earl’s shoulders began to shake as the dotted scratches deepened, and his voice broke, Shelly took pity on him. “I accept. Now answer my questions quickly. First, who named the child?”

  He gave her a strange look. “What possible bearing…oh very well, don’t scowl at me. Her mother. It was a family name she was fond of.”

  “Do you have her picture?”

  He went to the mantel above the fireplace and brought back the daguerreotype of a lovely woman who had Arielle’s deep blue eyes, luminescent beauty, and black hair. She wore the same strange amulet now around the girl’s neck. Shelly looked between the picture and Arielle’s necklace to be sure, but the amulet looked the same, though its golden luster had faded a bit over the years. Shelly knew the central embossed image of Bast, the cat goddess, was of Egyptian origin. Obviously a precious family heirloom, also obviously passed down from mother to daughter. And since Arielle meant, ‘lioness of god’ and the child had a fixation on cats, it was a reasoned guess at this point, but it seemed likely that Arielle’s ailment had been handed down from her own mother.

  Shelly handed the picture back. “How did the countess die?”

  He turned the picture face forward into the wall and said through his teeth, “Suicide.”

  “Was she of English birth?”

  “Her mother was Egyptian. Her father was English.”

  “Her given name?”

  “Isis.” His voice had grown increasingly curt, as if he wondered how such stupid parlor room politesse could save his daughter from being marked for life. He hurried back to Arielle’s bedside, watching a deeper scratch form, this time on the back of her hand, before running his hands though his thick hair as if he actually wanted to tear it out rather than stand here helpless.

  Arielle was unaware of his anguish or Shelly’s keen observation. In her dream, as the light was extinguished, at first Arielle froze, her heartbeat making her thin night rail flutter on her full bosom. She was half eager, half afraid, for she knew the other came, bringing darkness with him. He was not so kind, but fascinating, withal.

  Sharp claws raked through her night rail into her flesh, not enough to wound, just enough to hold her and drag her back into the darkness. At first she struggled and tried to escape, but as a teasing claw trailed over her, goose bumps appeared on her skin. The pain was pleasure, the scratch a mark of honor.

  For this she was born.

  To be strong, and immortal, and one with the lion god, warrior king and protector of the realm. Arielle reached out to him in the utter darkness, wondering if he were the one after all, rather than the being of bright bold beauty.

  Perhaps in this world, too, as was her fate in the earthly vale, she was meant to remain in shadows. As she debated, feeling torn between the anguished growl coming from a distance and the pleased purr of the being holding her, her hands were teasingly caught by great extended claws, still half sheathed.

  See, he didn’t hurt her. Not even when he lifted her hands to her mouth. “Taste,” rasped a deep, magnetic voice as he forced her to lick her own wounds.

  She tasted, wondering how her own blood could be so sweet.

  “Drink. Taste the essence that belongs to me, blood of my blood.”

  Arielle felt the heat of him, the indomitable strength of him. The sharp scent of his arousal twisted her face into a grimace of response. Her memory of the other, even his anguished growl growing ever more far away, faded as she lapped her own blood.

  As she watched the girl, a dozen more questions formed on Shelly’s tongue. When she saw Arielle’s face twist into a grimace uncannily like that of the tigress she’d once seen mating, Shelly’s blood chilled. Then Arielle, her eyes still glazed and unseeing, lifted her own hand and licked the blood away with a daintily curled tongue, like a cat. Her nipples hardened under the thin night rail.

  And she purred.

  The earl turned a ghastly puce and backed a step, but Shelly followed her instincts and did the only logical thing–she jerked the amulet off the girl’s neck, strode to the door, flung it wide and tossed the amulet over the stair railing. Then she slammed the door shut again.

  Immediately, Arielle went very still. Her feet stopped moving. One more barely visible scratch appeared as they watched, this one on her flawless bosom, but then it stopped. That faint sense of menace in the room receded, and the gas lamps sputtered and flared more brightly.

  They both waited, breath held, but they shared a sigh of mutual relief as slowly, Arielle returned to herself, her eyes blinking back to awareness. Shelly noted that the eerie amber glow was also gone, leaving her eyes wounded pools of bottomless blue despair.

  Bewildered, Arielle looked between her father and the tall, rather ugly woman with a strong jaw and unrelenting gray eyes. “Papa, what is wrong…” She gasped as she saw the marks on her arms and hands. “Oh no, not again!”

  The earl took his daughter into his arms. Above her head, his eyes met Shelly’s. “Thank you,” he said softly. “I’ll have it destroyed immediately.”

  But to his apparent confusion, Shelly shook her head emphatically. “I must have it to investigate, but I’ll keep it under lock and key. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m weary from my journey.” Nodding at father and daughter, Shelly quit the room.

  “Who is that woman?” she heard Arielle ask as she closed the door.

  Downstairs, she picked up the amulet and turned it from side to side. There were hieroglyphs on the back, but of the five languages she spoke fluently, none included ancient Egyptian. She’d have to have help. She was also not terribly pleased with the earl, for she suspected there was much he wasn’t telling her.

  Including the fact that he must have seen similar behavior before. From his own wife. Before she killed herself. There had been…recognition in his horrified gaze as he backed away from Arielle’s bed as she licked her own blood.

  When the butler approached to show her to her room, Shelly pocketed the amulet and carried her own baggage over his horrified protests.

  The next morning, after breakfast, Shelly had a private meeting with the earl in his study to discuss Arielle’s affliction. At first the earl was resistant to the idea that his daughter had some mystical ailment that made her exhibit cat-like tendencies, but when Shelly stated, “She has the strongest case of astral projection I’ve ever witnessed,” the earl sagged back in his chair and bowed his head.

  “How would you propose to combat it and bring her back to me?
”

  “How often does she socialize with others her age?”

  “Almost never. I believe she attended a friend’s coming out party some…” he calculated mentally and then added with horror, “by Jove it’s near two years ago now.”

  “The best way to make her cling to her humanity is by exercising it. Are there any balls or teas she can attend where some of her friends might be present?”

  “I fear since the accident in which she hurt her leg a few years back that she’s let all her friendships lapse.”

  “Well,” Shelly rose decisively. “She’s not changing that by sitting alone in her room, prey to nightmares. I’d strongly suggest that you speak with her and wheedle her into socializing, preferably some type of outing in which she can enjoy herself and be around others her age.”

  The earl nodded his agreement.

  So it was that a few nights later, Arielle descended from their best carriage on her father’s arm. Wheedling was not a word she would have used to describe her father’s tactics in getting her here, standing before one of the grandest mansions in London on one of the grandest streets, dressed in the new gown he’d insisted on purchasing for her. He’d insisted she’d want to look her best on this, her first ball since her own coming out some years back.

  She swallowed as she looked up at the brightly lit facade, mullioned windows blazing and posh guests entering the colonaded exterior in a constant stream. “Father, I feel ill,” she whispered, trying to turn back to the carriage, but it had already been driven to the back by the efficient lackeys in uniform who were organizing traffic.

  “Nonsense. You’re just nervous. Come, Arielle. This will be fun if you let it be, or torture if you agonize over every step.”

  “But how can I dance with my limp?”

  “No one will notice it but you. Now quit complaining and have fun.”

  She had to smile at his scowl. “You’re ordering me to have fun?”

  He laughed and squeezed her arm affectionately. “Only if you don’t cooperate.”

  The beautiful ballroom was packed with beautiful people, but even when a few smiled and nodded, she was too tongue tied to do more than nod uncomfortably back. The slight unevenness in her gait felt like a mortal sin to her, akin to a scarlet A painted on her chest, so different did she feel to these other simpering misses.